this poor world;--I too,--though I know its meltings to-me-ward.
Then I learned that the newspapers had announced the death of
your mother (which I heard of casually on the Rock River,
Illinois), and that you and your brother John had been with her
in Scotland. I remembered what you had once and again said of
her to me, and your apprehensions of the event which has come. I
can well believe you were grieved. The best son is not enough a
son. My mother died in my house in November, who had lived with
me all my life, and kept her heart and mind clear, and her own,
until the end. It is very necessary that we should have
mothers,--we that read and write,--to keep us from becoming
paper. I had found that age did not make that she should die
without causing me pain. In my journeying lately, when I think
of home the heart is taken out.

Miss Bacon wrote me in joyful fulness of the cordial kindness and
aid she had found at your hands, and at your wife's; and I have
never thanked you, and much less acknowledged her copious
letter,--copious with desired details. Clough, too, wrote about
you, and I have not written to him since his return to England.
You will see how total is my ossification. Meantime I have
nothing to tell you that can explain this mild palsy. I worked
for a time on my English Notes with a view of printing, but was
forced to leave them to go read some lectures in Philadelphia and
some Western towns. I went out Northwest to great countries
which I had not visited before; rode one day, fault of broken
railroads, in a sleigh, sixty-five miles through the snow, by
Lake Michigan, (seeing how prairies and oak-openings look in
winter,) to reach Milwaukee; "the world there was done up in
large lots," as a settler told me. The farmer, as he is now a